Why Did You Hear My Heart Only To Break It
“Can I listen to your heart?” I’d known you an hour but it felt like a lifetime. “It’s beating so fast.” I blamed the caffeine tablets I hadn’t taken that day. I didn’t tell you it was your head to my chest, your fingertips on my skin, that made every nerve in my body pulse, electrical currents and neurons firing, contributing to a wired state countering the fact I hadn’t slept peacefully in days.
You loved like a poet, and spoke every jumbled thought that came to your mind. “I’m sorry for yapping” I never wanted you to stop. I could listen to you on repeat for hours and learn all the lyrics to sing back to myself when you left. Replaying conversations over and over like a record, side A, side B. Repeat. You asked me who my favourite artist is and in that small space of time it was you.
Three days of passion, art and a love I had never had the pleasure, or burden, of experiencing in my 26 orbits of the sun. Would it have been kinder to never have felt this? Or should I count myself lucky to have felt so much, so fast? Existentialism brought us together - isn’t it funny how, in your absence, I’ve been driven into the deepest dread I’ve known yet. I find myself lacking purpose more than ever, glorifying what could have been had you stayed. I find it impossible to imagine a greater love, a greater intensity, without knowing what we could have been.
As I move through the world in the days following, I try to make sense of your departure - so out of character from the person I became enamoured with. I blame it on an unmatched ability to compartmentalise, but the conclusion I keep drawing is that perhaps my experience was not original. Nevertheless, my analysis doesn’t bring me closer to closure, nor does it soften the ache. I fear I will search for you in every person I meet from this point onwards, and never recognise what I find.
While you may never hear my heart again, I know it will never steady to a comfortable rhythm. It will continue to beat for you just as it did that night, your musical monologues running through my mind with each day that passes since we met. If I dig deep enough into the pain I find a buried new inspiration. You have set an unreachable standard for a love that I will seek for the rest of my years, one I’m unsure whether to thank you for or resent. But in time I will figure it out.
I’ll catch myself on the flip.
